Supreme Court rules New Hampshire can ban use of student IDs for midterm voters

The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for New Hampshire to fully ban the use of student IDs for voting during the midterm elections.

The justices granted a Republican-backed emergency appeal and blocked the use of student IDs as a backup method of identification.

New Hampshire passed a law this year that said student IDs would no longer be an expressly accepted form of identification for obtaining a ballot. The secretary of state then issued guidance barring them as a backup way to prove a voter’s identity.

A judge left the law in place but blocked the guidance in early October, prompting the appeal to the Supreme Court. The Republican National Committee weighed in to support the state.

In its brief one-paragraph decision, the Supreme Court invoked the longstanding “Purcell principle,” quoting a previous 2020 decision that stated that the high court “has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

The decision was unsigned. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only justice to publicly dissent from the ruling, arguing that the Purcell principle did not necessarily apply in this case.

“It seems to me that a case involving a court order like the one at issue here—which left the state election rule untouched—does not necessarily fall within the ambit of Purcell and its concern about federal courts ‘changing the election rules’ at the last minute,” Jackson wrote.

The Supreme Court wrote in its opinion Thursday that the lower court “did not point to anything that would justify deviating” from the Purcell principle.

In a statement, Republican New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella praised the ruling, writing that “New Hampshire has a responsibility to protect the integrity of its elections and ensure that election laws are applied as written.”

Formella called it “an important victory for our efforts to defend those laws and prevent last-minute court orders from creating uncertainty for voters and election officials.”

The decision comes less than two weeks before New Hampshire voters cast ballots in a closely contested U.S. Senate race.